from aids to versailles
NORDLINGER, JAY
Music From AIDS to Versailles By Jay Nordlinger John Corigliano has almost become world-famous, and for a composer of classical music who is living and breathing among us, that is rare indeed....
...The work is convincing in its way—some will even prefer it, in its theatricality, to the symphony—and it refrains from crossing the line into the hectoring and maudlin until the end, when members of the chorus are invited to shout out names of those who have died and whom they wish to remember...
...Corigliano's secret is that he strives to please concert-goers and music-lovers...
...they are the "ghosts" of the title, banished from the earth and suspended in a no-man's-land...
...Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern techniques (one hostile critic called it a "mas-terpastiche...
...He may not prove to be immortal, but immortality is a lot to ask in an age when even interesting mediocrity is scarce...
...Corigliano gained a bit of notoriety in 1970 with a rock-and-roll opera, The Naked Carmen, the sort of work that flourished like weeds back then...
...He achieved real name recognition in 1991 with the premiere in New York of his opera The Ghosts of Versailles...
...Titled Of Rage and Remembrance— the subtitle of one of the symphony's movements—it is a cantata for voices, strings, and percussion...
...And it has been treated to two major-label recordings, which is extraordinary for a work so new...
...There is, for example, a sublime quartet at the end of the first act that includes an especially memorable melody on the words, "Come, my darling, come to me...
...This movement is by turns reflective and chaotic, melancholy and tumultuous...
...Cor-igliano is an intellectual who has thought deeply about his craft, but he has resisted the temptation to become incomprehensible and to spurn beauty as a blight...
...So too are various operatic traditions...
...Corigliano, born in 1938, is John Jr...
...Corigliano states plainly that the piece "has a political dimension, because of all the right-wing and religious response to AIDS...
...we would have saved a lot of lives...
...There follows a tarantella, borrowed from an earlier (and excellent) Corigliano work, Gazebo Dances...
...It is soaring, throb-bing—close to emotionally exploitative...
...Corigliano is, as Aaron Copland said of him, "the real thing...
...But The Ghosts of Versailles is not the only source of his fame...
...He thinks of himself as a communicator, and not merely with himself and his chums from the conservatory...
...Corigliano and his librettist, again Hoffman, alternate between mocking the medium—sometimes scaldingly— and paying homage to it...
...His father, John Sr., was for 23 years the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic and did everything he could to discourage his son from pursuing music...
...John Jr...
...The story revolves around Marie Antoinette and the doomed court of Louis XVI...
...It is meant to suggest the trials of dementia: Now it is merry, now woozy, now it tumbles shriek-ingly into the abyss...
...It created a global sensation...
...The plot is zanily complicated in the tradition of opera buffa...
...indeed, some critics have objected that the symphony is no more than musical journalism...
...come to the place I have made for thee...
...The opera is a curiosity for now and a cause for rejoicing among those who leap at anything new simply because it is new...
...he takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach made possible by an intimate knowledge of the instruments and their relation to one another...
...Musicians certainly knew of him, but Time and Newsweek had yet to seek an interview...
...But he continued to prosper with works like the charming Poem in October, a setting of Dylan Thomas verses for tenor and chamber ensemble...
...but it shows signs of staying power...
...Every day, his name grows more familiar...
...But Corigliano is too gifted to have served up only that...
...For 30 years, he had been writing commendable music, with little public attention...
...At the end of a particularly riotous stretch, a stereotypical Valkyrie, complete with horned helmet, stomps to the front of the stage, plants her feet, and sings, "This is not opera...
...It had not staged a new opera in 25 years, but it wanted one—an American one—for its centennial season...
...So John Corigliano is riding high...
...But it is Corigliano, an American nearing 60, who has commanded the stage this decade, and for reasons not entirely due to his music...
...His reputation among musicians was cemented later in the 1970s with three concertos for woodwinds—especially a clarinet concerto...
...indeed, it may already have been eclipsed by the continuing success of his Symphony No...
...They would not...
...Rossini and Mozart had taken two of the trilogy (in The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro...
...In the early 1980s, Corigliano joined the list of distinguished composers who have turned to Hollywood for a little glamor and cash, writing scores for the films Altered States and Revolution...
...It sounds bizarre to assert that a composer has "dared" to be popular, but this is what Corigliano has done...
...I pray for the day when my symphony is no longer specific," he says...
...Often it is performed in cities to which the quilt has traveled, and Corigliano himself endeavors to appear at associated "awareness seminars" and fund-raisers...
...The first recording, by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, spent more than a year on Billboard's classical chart and garnered a pair of Grammys...
...But his big break came from an unlikely source: the Metropolitan Opera Company, one of America's leading musical institutions and an alleged bastion of conservatism...
...Its opening was the cultural event in New York that year...
...harmony and discord...
...In Kiev, "they just heard a tragic symphony," whereas in San Francisco "the audience realized it's very specific...
...It is like producing a recording called "Spanish Composers of the Zarzuela...
...Time and Newsweek came to call on Corigliano...
...Corigliano claimed the third, La mere coupable...
...But The Ghosts of Versailles is not merely camp, though camp it certainly is...
...Stupendously difficult to play, it is the current standard for virtuosity among clarinetists, only a relative handful of whom can manage it, and it was his best-known work until the symphony and The Ghosts of Versailles made their marks...
...Write so much as a tuneful triplet, and you could be dis-missed—in the music departments of the poorer universities, for exam-ple—as a sellout...
...And thus the piece becomes group therapy...
...1. The symphony, which debuted a year before the opera, has to do with AIDS...
...Most of the critics were excitedly approving...
...The final movement, "Giulio's Song," is an elegy for cello...
...The symphony has already received over 150 performances by 68 orchestras in 15 countries—staggering figures for a contemporary piece...
...not in living memory had a contemporary work of classical music been so rapturously received...
...the public bubbled over...
...Orchestra members wear red ribbons, and panels from the quilt hang from auditorium rafters...
...He went so far as to show the young man's violin sonata to the conductor George Szell and the composer David Diamond in the hope that they would disparage it...
...Wagner is opera...
...The happiest consequence of the "AIDS symphony"—whose trappings virtually guaranteed its success—is that Corigliano's earlier compositions are being accorded a wider hearing...
...Corigliano has fixed that, however, with a new piece that can be heard on the Slatkin recording...
...As this crack suggests, Ghosts is an opera about opera...
...The Met selected Corigliano, and The Ghosts of Versailles was the dizzying result...
...The work is filled with musical allusions and inside jokes...
...Ah, but if these were the only criteria for fame in the world of music, today's composers would be appearing on Wheaties boxes like Olympic gold medalists...
...A ghostly Beaumarchais, who is a character in the opera, falls in love with Marie and seeks to win her affections and spare her neck by creating another Figaro story that can somehow reach back in time and alter historical events...
...the house was sold out every night...
...Yet "part of the greatness of music is its non-specificness...
...showed great promise, they said, and the exuberant, spiky sonata is today one of the most respected in the American repertory...
...My symphony has been played in very conservative places and it gets through where words don't—to people who would never go to see a play or even a ballet about AIDS...
...Corigliano was audacious in his choice of subject: He went to the core of the art form, the Figaro operas, based on the 18th-century comedies of Beaumarchais...
...Without words, classical music is not threatening...
...This is an intelligent, arresting work, whose power and beauty are hard to deny...
...No work ever came with extra-musical credentials more sparkling...
...Corigliano insists that his sym-phony—"generated by feelings of loss, anger, and frustration"—is not bound by its ideological mission and will survive it...
...And it is possible that, generations from now, pianists will rip into his piano concerto, clarinetists revel in the exhibitionism of his clarinet concerto, and singers give voice to "Come, my darling, come to me . . ." as audiences smile and sigh and cry...
...A piano is heard in the distance: It is Albeniz's Tango, a favorite piece of the departed friend to whom the first movement is dedicated...
...He has had his flirtations with modern compositional methods— serialism, minimalism, and the rest—but he has remained an adventurer and synthesist, opting to experiment and borrow...
...He was transformed into a phenomenon...
...And yet fame has found Corigliano as it has not found, to take one example, Lee Hoiby, an American composer some 12 years older who has toiled all his life in virtual anonymity...
...The cantata sets to music a poem by William M. Hoffman that calls the roll of deceased friends and laments a "season of stone...
...If the American government had acted earlier...
...Rossini, Mozart, and others are quoted liberally throughout...
...The symphony shows off the composer's considerable skills of orchestration...
...one of the ghosts exclaims...
...It begins with the strings' pouncing on a single, angry note, announcing that a Serious Statement is in the works...
...Corigliano wrote it after seeing the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and like the sections of the quilt, each of the symphony's movements commemorates a friend dead of the disease...
...Many modern composers view accessibility with suspicion and unpopularity as a badge of honor...
...Ghosts is an eclectic work, using harpsichord and synthesizer...
...A record company recently issued a recording called "Gay American Composers," a hilariously unnecessary and redundant title...
...I couldn't follow the last act of The Marriage of Figaro, and this is even worse...
...Even those who cared little about opera or music had a vague awareness that something unusual, something pulse-quickening, was taking place...
...I don't feel bad about saying these things, and if the symphony has to be political for the time being, that's fine...
...The symphony at times seems intended to accompany something larger, rather than being a complete thing in itself...
...every day, his election by the musical gods (or at least the publicity men) is made clearer...
...Other composers vie for attention, and they have their audiences: Henryk Gorecki, for one, whose Third Symphony is a brisk seller in record stores...
...Still, the question may arise from skeptical conservatives: Is Corigliano celebrated and puffed because he is outspokenly homosexual and outspokenly left-wing...
...The second, by Leonard Slatkin and Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, was released earlier this year in time for the display of the AIDS quilt on the Mall...
...If the piece has an obvious flaw—one that recurs in Corigliano's work—it is its tendency to bounce from idea to idea in a presentation of moods...
...The piano continues while the rest of the orchestra maintains its mournful, slightly atonal course, like movie music during a scene in which a character gets a faraway look in his eyes and falls dreamily into a flashback...
...The Ghosts of Versailles is a great mess of a work, but whether you are appalled or fascinated by it (or both), your interest does not flag and you marvel at the daring—at the gaudi-ness—of it all...
...It quickly won the $150,000 Grawe-meyer Award, often described as "music's Nobel...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 12
